15-Minute Reviews :: FastPaste v2.60

Greetings everyone and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is FastPaste version 2.60 by DextroNet – An application to help with inserting commonly-used text or images frequently.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“FastPaste saves your time. Paste frequently used text, formatted text and images with custom hotkeys! Makes it easy to enter frequently used text blocks: signatures, e-mail addresses, internet and IP addresses, logins or passwords, pictures, etc. Has also clipboard processing functions, like case conversion or diacritics remover.”

Quick Pros

• Easy to get set up and running
• Ability to add image to a ‘clip’ handy for saving a watermark or similar
• Case Conversion an interesting feature
• Remove diacritics a nice feature – Many website tools don’t like them

Quick Cons

• Auto-save off initially in application
• Would be nice if the keyboard shortcuts could be changed to a default, instead of changing them one at a time
• Default keyboard shortcuts (Especially Control+#) are same as some applications

Expansion

I am always looking for an application to speed my work up by clearing away repetition. This application offers you the ability to save clips of text (plain and RTF formatted) as well as images into one of 30 ‘clips’ which then can be activated by Control+#/Control+Shift+#/Control+Alt+# (By default.) You can also have multiple projects, and also quickly switch between those using Control+F-key (1 through 8.) The application was easy to get set up and running; There are a lot of settings – They can be a bit overwhelming to change them – I recommend going through the application’s preferences to start with and turn on the save on close feature – It is off by default for some reason.

There were a bunch of other interesting features in the application to alter the clipboard contents, including an assortment of case conversion commands as well as remove diacritics. With case conversion you can change the clipboard contents to upper case, lower case, proper case, zig zag and more; I wish there were keyboard shortcuts available to be attached to these. There is also the feature to remove diacritics. I found this handy because my CMS does not appreciate diacritics and will display a bunch of symbols instead of the actual symbol. I know there are other applications that do not like diacritics as well, so this may be handy to some. As a note, again, I would have hoped for a keyboard shortcut.

My biggest issue with this application was that I could not use the keyboard shortcuts for clips frequently due to their overlap with other applications (Firefox for example) – I found I had to change all of the clips I had set up to function with whatever application I would normally be using. I found this increasing the complexity by forcing you to go through up to 30 clips to change them out as well as the level of memorization increasing further. It would have been nice to seen support for the Windows key in combination with the number keys. As mentioned as well, there is no way to change the default keysets to another keyset in the global preferences (IE:- An option to change what the Control/Control+Shift/etc is for banks 1-10, 11-20 and 21-30 that would be default and then you could override them in each clip’s settings.) This may help with the aspect of ‘tediousness’ in the application, especially when you have to change your shortcuts to mesh well with some of your applications.

Final Verdict

Overall this application is handy so long as you don’t get caught up with FastPaste’s keys and the application you’re attempting to paste into stepping on each other. This offers a different angle on the quick-paste idea than Smart Type Assistant or KeyBreeze and could be useful for those looking for the simple ability to quick-paste – With RTF and image clips, it does have this over some other applications. While free, if you have a use for it, go ahead and grab it to see if you can use it. While for $19.95, it may be worth it, but I do recommend trying it first to see if it works well for you; The keyboard shortcuts may be a bit to chew off.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, May 22, 2007